Wednesday, August 8, 2012

Andrei Chikatilo

First Hints

The first body found was mostly bones. A man looking for firewood in the lesopolosa,
a rectangular “shelterbelt” or forested strip of land planted to
prevent erosion, found the remains. While the area was only about 50
yards wide, with a path running through it, no one had seen this body
until it was pretty well decomposed. There were small patches of
leathered skin on some of the bones and some black hair hanging from
the skull. The man who found the remains reported them to the militsia, the local authorities in this southern region of Russia

The body had no identifying clothing and
had been left on its back, the head turned to one side. The ears were
still sufficiently intact to see tiny holes for earrings, and those,
along with the length of the hair, suggested that this victim had been
female. It also appeared from her postmortem posture that she had
tried to fight her attacker. It appeared that two ribs had been
broken, perhaps by a knife, and closer inspection indicated numerous
stab wounds into the bone. A knife had apparently cut into the eye
sockets, too, as if to remove the eyes, and similar gouges were viewed
in the pelvic region.

Whoever had done this, the police thought, had been a frenzied beast.

They did have a report on a missing
13-year-old girl, Lyubov Biryuk from Novocherkassk, a village not far
away. Investigators called the uncle of the missing girl who had done
an extensive search for her after she’d disappeared earlier in the
month. He came to where the body lay to look at the remains.

Lyubov’s uncle, perhaps clutching to some
small glimpse of hope, said his niece’s hair was not as dark and that
the bones looked to him as if they had been there longer than she had
been missing.

Major Mikhail Fetisov (police file photo)

A few hours later, Major Mikhail Fetisov arrived from militsia headquarters in Rostov-on-Don, the closest large city. He was the leading detective, or syshchik,
for the entire region. He asked for records of other missing persons in
the area and ordered military cadets in training to search the
surrounding woods. He also ordered the remaining skin on the hands be
fingerprinted.

The next day, the searchers found a white
sandal and yellow bag containing the brand of cigarettes that the
young girl had set out to purchase. Then fingerprints of the corpse
and the schoolgirl’s book covers confirmed that this body was
Lyubov’s. DNA analysis for body identification was several years away,
but from what evidence they had, they could be sure it was the
missing girl. The medical examiner hypothesized that warm temperatures
and heavy rain had afforded the accelerated state of decomposition.

Despite a thorough search around the
remains, no evidence was produced that could help to identify the
person who had killed her, and the dress that Lyubov had worn was
missing. That meant that no trace evidence could be collected from it.
It was thought to be a random attack, nearly impossible to solve.

According to Robert Cullen, author of a
well-known book on the case, most murders in that area of Russia fell
into one of two categories: intimate killings, in which a person got
into a rage or a drunken state and murdered someone he knew, usually a
family member; and instrumental murders done to take something from
the victim. But no one in the girl’s family was a clear suspect and
she’d had nothing of any value on her person.

There was a path near the body that
people traveled often, and a road only 75 yards away. This had been a
crime of some risk, with evidence of overkill. Although sexual crimes
were considered manifestations of self-indulgent Western societies,
there were plenty of signs that this incident had been just such a
killing.

It became clear later from the autopsy
report that she had been attacked from behind and hit hard in the head
with both the handle and the blade of a knife. Perhaps she’d been
knocked out right away. At any rate, she had been stabbed at least 22
separate times and mutilated in other ways. (In Hunting the Devil, told by Richard Lourie partly from the killer’s perspective, the number of wounds was 41.)

The police came up with ideas and began
looking for possible suspects: those who were mentally ill, juvenile
delinquents, or someone with a history of sex crimes. They tried to
find out whom Lyubov had known and how she might have encountered this
killer.

One man, convicted in another rape,
learned that he was a suspect and promptly hanged himself. That seemed
to put an end to the investigation. There were no other viable
suspects, and for all they knew, the killer had found his own form of
redemption.

But then another victim was discovered.

The Division of Especially Serious Crimes

Less than two months after the discovery
of Lyubov’s remains, a railroad worker who was walking near the train
station for Shakhty, a small industrial town 20 miles away, came
across a set of skeletal remains. It appeared to have been there for
approximately six weeks and was soon identified as an adult woman. The
body had been stripped, left facedown, with the legs open. What made
investigators take note was a key similarity with the murder of
Lyubov: multiple stab wounds and lacerated eye sockets. That was a
rare manifestation of murder.

Since no one of this approximate size and gender had been reported missing, no identification was made.

Only a month later, a soldier gathering
wood about 10 miles south of that spot came across more remains, also
of a woman lying face down. She had been covered with branches, but
close inspection showed the pattern of knife wounds and damage to the
eye sockets. She, too, remained unknown.

The linkage was obvious. A serial killer
had claimed at least three victims. But no one was admitting that,
especially not to the press. Officially what they had were three
separate unsolved murders. (They actually had seven that year, Richard
Lourie says, but they would not know that for some time to come.)

Major Fetisov organized a task force of
10 men to start an aggressive full-time investigation. He intended to
get to the heart of this and stop this maniac from preying on any more
female citizens. Among those he recruited was a second lieutenant
from the criminology laboratory named Viktor Burakov, 37, and his
perspective is presented in Cullen’s book. He was the best man they
had for the analysis of physical evidence like fingerprints,
footprints, and other manifestations at a crime scene, and he was an
expert in both police science and the martial arts. Known for his
diligence, he was invited aboard the Division of Especially Serious
crimes in January 1983. Little did anyone realize then just how
diligent he would prove to be and would have to be.

Viktor Burakov (police file photo)

That same month, a fourth victim was found. She appeared to have been
killed about six months earlier and was near the area where the second
set of remains was discovered. She, too, had the familiar knife wounds,
but some female clothing was found nearby and assumed to be hers. She
was possibly a teenager.

All they knew at this point was that the
killer—whom they now called the Maniac—did not smoke (or he’d have
taken the cigarettes found near Lyubov), and that he was a man. He had
some issue with eyes, but whether it was based on superstition or a
fetish or some other consideration authorities had no idea. At any
rate, as Cullen points out, gouging out the eyes indicated that the
killer spent some time with the victims after they were dead.

With no definite leads, the unit decided
to look back in time and see if there might be other victims.
Burakov’s first real task was to head an investigation in
Novoshakhtinsk, a farming and mining town in the general area, where a
10-year-old girl had just been reported missing.

Confusion

Olga Stalmachenok had gone to a piano
lesson on December 10, 1982. No one had seen her since. Burakov
questioned her parents and learned that she got along with them and
had no apparent cause to just run away. However, the parents had
received a strange postcard from “Sadist-Black Cat” telling them their
daughter was in the woods and warning that there would be 10 more
victims that coming year. Burakov dismissed this as a sick prank, but
still feared that the girl was dead.

Then on April 14, four months after her
disappearance, Olga’s body was found in a field about three miles from
the music conservatory where she had gone for her lesson. Her nude
body was lying in a frozen tractor rut on a collective farm. The
police left her in place until Burakov could arrive to see the crime
scene for himself. Because she had been killed during the winter, the
snow had preserved the corpse, so the pattern of knife wounds was
clearly visible on her bluish-white skin. The skull was punctured, as
were the chest and stomach. The knife had been inserted dozens of
times, as if in a frenzy, moving the organs around in the body cavity.
The killer had especially targeted the heart, lungs, and sexual
organs. And as with the others, this offender had attacked the eyes
with his single-bladed knife.

Without a doubt, Burakov knew that he
was looking for a vicious, sexually-motivated serial killer who was
attacking victims at a quickening rate, drawing no attention to what
he was doing, and leaving no evidence. There were no resources that
Burakov was aware of to utilize. Men who killed in this manner were
supposedly few and only top-ranking officials knew the details of
those investigations.

Burakov, who followed the long route
from the conservancy to the place where the body was left, believed
the killer had a car. He also felt sure the man did not frighten
people when he approached. There was nothing overt in his appearance
that would alarm women or children. That would make him harder to
find, though he surely had some sort of covert mental disorder that
hopefully some people noticed.

They decided to focus fully on
investigating known sex offenders in the area, specifically where they
were on December 11. Then on released mental patients, and then men
who lived or worked around the conservancy who owned or used a car.
Also, handwriting experts came in to compare the Black Cat card
against samples from the entire population of that town. It was
tedious work, with no promise of yielding a single clue. Yet doing
nothing was guaranteed to provide no clue, so at least they had a
start.

What they did not know, according to
Lourie, was that a 15-year-old boy had also been killed in a similar
manner near Shakhty, then left to be covered by snow. He would not be
found for some time.

For the next four months, nothing turned
up of any value, although they realized that snow could easily cover
what might have occurred, and then it was discovered that the killer
had struck again. In another wooded lesopolosa near
Rostov-on-Don, a group of boys found some bones in a gully. Again,
they could find no missing-persons report, and an examination of the
bones not only linked this crime with the others but revealed that the
girl (it seemed) had had Down’s syndrome. That made things a little
easier, despite the horror of realizing the killer had lured a
mentally retarded child with no possibility of defending herself. They
could check the special schools in the area to make an
identification.

A 45-year-old woman was also murdered in the woods over the winter, but no one linked her to the lesopolosa series. That would come later.

The girl turned out to have been 13,
attending a school for children with her condition. No one had missed
her, since she often left, so no one had reported her. But her case
took a back seat to the next body, discovered in September in a wooded
area near Rostov’s airport, two miles from victim No. 6. However it
was an 8-year-old boy. He had been stabbed, like the others, including
his eyes, and it turned out that he had been missing since August 9.
Like the little girl going to piano lessons, he had ridden on public
transportation.

This new development puzzled everyone.
With what little was known about killers, the basic analysis was that
they always went after the same type of victim. This man had killed
grown women and young children, girls and boys. The investigators
wondered if they might have more than one killer doing the same kind
of perverse ritual. It seemed impossible, but so did the idea that so
many victim types could trigger the same type of sexual violence in
one person.

Then Burakov learned that the killer had
finally been apprehended. It was over. He went to the jail to learn
what he could about this man.

Confession

The suspect was Yuri Kalenik, 19. He had
lived for years in a home for retarded children and had then been
trained to lay floors in construction. He remained friends with older
boys in his former residence and one day when they were riding on a
trolley, the conductor caught them. Grabbing one boy, she wanted to
know what he knew about the recent murders and he told her that Yuri
had done them. So based on the squirming accusation of a mentally slow
boy who was trying to free himself from punishment, the officials
believed they had broken the case.

Yuri was arrested and interrogated. He
had no right to a lawyer or to remain silent. He barely knew what was
happening to him. Nevertheless, he denied everything. He had not
killed anyone. Yet the interrogators kept him there for several days,
believing (according to Cullen) that a guilty man will inevitably
confess. It soon became clear to Yuri that to stop being beaten he
would have to tell them what they wanted to hear, so he did. And then
some. He confessed to all seven murders, and added four unsolved
murders in the area to his list. Now all the police needed was
supporting evidence. This young man was quite a catch.

Viktor Burakov accepted the task of
further investigation. Yuri seemed a viable suspect, because he had a
mental disorder and he rode on public transportation. And why would he
confess to such brutal crimes if he did not do them? At the time—and
even today—there was little understanding of the psychology of false
confessions. Less intelligent people tend to be more susceptible to
suggestion, especially when fatigued, and they will tell interrogators
whatever pleases them—usually supplying whatever clues they hear from
the questions. Sociologist Richard Ofshe recounts case after case of
suspects who admitted to things they did not do, despite the harsh
consequences, and Wrightsman lists several studies of people exonerated
by DNA evidence who had confessed to the crime for which they were
imprisoned. Most juries do not believe people will confess falsely and
they accept a confession as the best type of evidence against someone.

Even better, when a suspect can lead
police to the site of where someone was murdered, that’s considered
good confirmation, and Kalenik did just that with several of the
incidents. Nevertheless, Burakov was not convinced. He saw that
Kalenik did not go straight to a site, even when he was close, but
appeared to wander around until he picked up clues from the police
about where they expected him to go. Burakov did not consider that to
be a good test. Upon examining the written confession, he was even
less convinced. It was clear to him that Kalenik had been given most
of the information that he was expected to say, and had then felt
intimidated.

It was difficult to know just how to proceed, but then another body was found.

Operation Lesopolosa

In another wooded area, the mutilated
remains of a young woman were found. Her nipples had been
removed—possibly with teeth, her abdomen was slashed open, and one eye
socket was damaged. She had been there for several months and her
clothing was missing. Kalenik could have been responsible for this
one, whose identity remained unknown, since he was free at the time,
but not the next one, found on October 20.

She had been murdered approximately
three days earlier, while Kalenik was in custody. He definitely did
not kill her, but her wounds were similar to those of the other
victims. Whoever had killed her was growing bolder and more frenzied
in his surgical removal of parts. This victim was entirely
disemboweled, and the missing organs were nowhere to be found.
However, her eyes remained intact. She might not be part of the
series, although she did ride the trains. Perhaps the killer had
changed his method or had been interrupted.

Four weeks later and not far away from
that site, a set of skeletal remains was found in the woods. Her death
was estimated to have occurred some time during the summer, and her
eyes had been gouged out.

It wasn’t long before the 10th unsolved
murder turned up, just after the turn of the year into 1984. This one
was a boy, found near the railroad tracks. He was identified as Sergei
Markov, a 14-year-old boy missing since December 27. For the first
time, thanks to winter’s preservative effects, the detectives, led by
Mikhail Fetisov, were able to see just what the killer did to these
young people.

He had stabbed the boy in the neck
dozens of times—the final count would be 70—and he had then cut into
the boy’s genitals and removed everything from the pubic area. In
addition, he had violated his victim anally. Then it appeared that he
had gone to a spot nearby to have a bowel movement.

Clearly the jailed Kalenik was not
responsible and the maniac who was perpetrating these crimes was still
very much at large. In their rush to close these cases, the police
had made a mistake.

Fetisov decided to retrace the boy’s
steps on the day he had disappeared. Beginning in a town called
Gukovo, where the boy had lived and from where he had gone that day,
he boarded the elechtrichka, or local train. In the same town
was a home for the mentally retarded and the teachers there reported
that a former student, Mikhail Tyapin, 23, had left around the same
time as the boy and had taken the train. He was a very large young man
and barely knew how to talk. Once again, the police got a confession.

Tyapin and his friend, Aleksandr
Ponomaryev, said they had met Markov, had lured him to the woods, and
killed him. They had also left their excrement. Tyapin, in particular,
had numerous violent fantasies, and he claimed credit for several
other unsolved murders in the area. But he never mentioned the damage
done to the eyes. And he and Ponomaryev confessed to two murders that
were proven to have been done by someone else.

The police were now thoroughly confused,
and Fetisov had some doubts, while Burakov felt certain they had not
apprehended the killer they were after. All of the so-called
confessions were flawed. He believed that only one person was involved,
that this person was a loner and not part of a gang, and that he was
clearly demented in some subtly perceivable way.

Then they had their first piece of good
evidence. The medical examiner found semen in Markov’s anus. He had
been raped and the perpetrator had ejaculated. When they apprehended
the killer, they could compare the blood antigens. This would not
afford a precise match, but could at least eliminate suspects. In
fact, it eliminated all of the young men who had confessed thus far.
They all had the wrong type of blood.

But then the lab issued another report,
claiming it had mixed up the sample. The type did indeed match that of
Mikhail Tyapin. That meant that the odds were good that they had
Markov’s killer.

Yet bodies still turned up.

Some Possible Leads

In 1984, numerous victims were
discovered in wooded areas, some of them quite close to where previous
bodies had lain before being discovered and removed. The first one
found after Typapin’s arrest was a woman who had been slashed up in
the same frenzy as previous victims. Yet her eyes were intact and one
new item was added: a finger had been removed.

They also had one more piece of
evidence: a shoeprint left in the mud, size 13. On the victim’s
clothing were traces of semen and blood.

She was soon identified as an
18-year-old girl who had been seen at the bus station with a boy who
worked nearby. When questioned, he had an alibi.

The medical examiner’s report returned
three significant facts: she’d had pubic lice, her stomach contained
undigested food, and there was no semen inside her. The killer
apparently had masturbated over her. It was also possible that, given
her state of poverty, she had been lured away with the promise of a
meal.

The police checked pharmacies for anyone purchasing lice treatments, but they came up empty-handed.

One thing they did discover was that
this woman had a friend who had been missing since 1982. Matching
dental records to skulls from various remains, they managed to
identify their second victim in the series. That linked two of the
victims together, one of whom had her eye sockets slashed and the
other who did not.

Another suspect was caught and he
confessed, but Burakov was looking for a certain personality type, and
no one thus far seemed to come close. He spoke out to officials and
was rebuked. His opinion also divided the task force into factions,
helped along by the fact that the crime lab could not give them a
definitive answer as to whether semen samples found on two victims
were from the same person. They brought in a forensic scientist from
the Moscow lab, who did better. They were type AB, she said, and with
that, she eliminated their entire list of suspects. None of the
confessions gathered thus far were any good and the killer was still
at large.

He struck that March in Novoshakhtinsk,
grabbing 10-year-old Dmitri Ptashnikov, who was found three days
later, mutilated and stabbed. The tip of his tongue and his penis were
missing. The semen on his shirt linked him to the previous two crimes
where semen was found. Near this body was a large footprint.

This time, however, there were
witnesses. The boy was seen following a tall, hollow-cheeked man with
stiff knees and large feet, wearing glasses. Yet no one had recognized
him. Someone else had seen a white car.

Lyudmila Alekseyeva (Victim)

Then a 17-year-old, Lyudmila Alekseyeva, was found slashed 39 times
with a kitchen knife, and leads went nowhere, wasting time and
resources. Soon there was another victim, and then another close by.
One was a girl, killed with a hammer, the other a woman stabbed many
times with a knife. Mother and daughter, they had died at the same
time. By the end of that summer in 1984, authorities counted 24 victims
that were probably murdered by the same man. Whenever semen was left
behind, it proved to have the same AB antigen. There was also a single
gray hair on one victim, which seemed to be from a man, and some
scraps of clothing near a boy that failed to match his clothes.

Lourie writes that the killer had
shifted his pattern somewhat that year. He now removed the upper lip,
and sometimes the nose, and left them in the victim’s mouth or
ripped-open stomach.

With no witnesses, little physical
evidence, and no way to know how this man was leading his victims off
alone, the police felt the investigation was out of control. This
killer had stepped up his pace from five victims the first year (they
believed) to something like one every two weeks. Surely he would
eventually make a mistake. They had no way of knowing as yet that they
had not found the earliest murders and it would be some time before
the killing spree was stopped. This man did not make many mistakes.

Suspects

With all the surveillance, it was
inevitable that certain suspicious men would be followed and detained,
and this procedure produced two suspects, each of which was
interesting for different reasons. One appeared to be the man they
were after and the other became an informant.

The Minister of the Interior appointed a
dozen new detectives to the case, and a task force of some 200 men
and women became involved in the investigation. Burakov was appointed
to head this team. That got him closer to leads as they came in. It
also shouldered him with the heavy responsibility of forming a good
plan to stop this killer. People were assigned to work undercover at
bus and train stations, and to wander the parks.

According to Cullen, they decided that
they were looking for a man between 25 and 30, tall, well built, with
type AB blood. He was careful and had at least average intelligence,
and was probably verbally persuasive. He traveled and lived with
either his mother or a wife. He might be a former psychiatric patient,
or a substance abuser, and he might have some knowledge of anatomy
and skill with a knife. Anyone who generally matched these
characteristics would have to submit to a blood test.

The press was not allowed to carry
stories about the links among these crimes, only to ask for witnesses
concerning one or another of the murders. No warnings were given to
parents to protect their children or to young women out alone.

The Rostov bus station (police file photo)

One undercover officer spotted an older man in the Rostov bus station.
He spoke to a female adolescent and when she got on her bus, he circled
around and sat next to another young woman. This was suspicious
behavior, so Major Zanasovsky thought it was time to question him. The
man’s name was Andrei Chikatilo and he was the manager of a machinery
supply company. He was there on a business trip, but lived in Shakhty.
As to why he was approaching young women, he admitted that he’d once
been a teacher and he missed talking to young people. The officer let
him go.

However, he spotted Chikatilo again and
followed him, boarding the same bus he got on in order to watch him.
“He seemed very ill at ease,” Zanasovsky’s report states, “and was
always twisting his head from one side to another.”

He followed Chikatilo into another bus
and saw him accost various women. When Chikatilo solicited a
prostitute and received oral sex under his coat, they arrested him for
indecent behavior in public and went through his briefcase. Inside
were a jar of Vaseline, a long kitchen knife, a piece of rope and a
dirty towel—nothing suggestive of business dealings.

Andrei Chikatilo, teacher (school photo)

Zanasovsky believed he had the lesopolosa killer. He urged the
procurator to come and interrogate the man. Chikatilo’s blood was
drawn and it was type A, not AB. He was also a member of the Communist
Party, with good character references. There was nothing in his
background to raise suspicion. Nevertheless, they kept him in jail for a
couple of days to see if sitting in a cell might pressure him into a
confession.

He denied everything, although he
admitted to “sexual weakness,” and was finally released. He was later
arrested again for petty thefts at work and he served three months in
prison. Still, he did not have the right blood type, so he was not
their killer.

Burakov decided to breach protocol and
consult with psychiatric experts in Moscow. He wanted to know what
they thought of the idea of a single person killing women and children
of both genders. Most were either uninterested or refused to say
much, due to insufficient detail. However, one psychiatrist, Alexandr
Bukhanovsky, agreed to study the few known details, as well as the
crime scene patterns, to come up with a profile. He read everything he
could find, specialized in sexual pathologies and schizophrenia, and
was willing to take risks. This case, unusual as it was, interested
him. He came up with a seven-page report.

Alexandr Bukhanovsky, psychiatric expert (police file photo)

The killer, he said, was a sexual deviate, between 25 and 50 years old,
around 5’10″ tall. He thought the man suffered from some form of
sexual inadequacy and he blinded his victims to prevent them from
looking at him. He also brutalized their corpses, partly out of
frustration and partly to enhance his arousal. He was a sadist and had
difficulty getting relief without cruelty. Often sadists like to
inflict superficial wounds, as was evident on many of these victims.
He was also compulsive, following the goading of his need, and would
be depressed until he could kill. He might even have headaches. He was
not retarded or schizophrenic. He could work out a plan and follow
it. He was a loner and he was the only offender involved.

Burakov got two other opinions, one of
which insisted there were two killers, and he felt that no one had
given him anything that brought him closer to closing the case. He was
still frustrated.

Working with the idea that the killer
had a sexual dysfunction, the dogged investigator looked up records of
men convicted of homosexual crimes and came across Valery Ivanenko,
who had committed several acts of “perversion” and who had claimed he
was psychotic. He also had a charismatic personality and once had been
a teacher. At age 46, he was tall and wore glasses. He’d been brought
to the psychiatric institute in Rostov but had escaped. In short, he
sounded too good to be true. He was the perfect suspect.

Staking out the apartment of the man’s
invalid mother, Burakov caught and arrested him. But his blood was
type A which eliminated him as the killer. In a deal, Burakov enlisted
his assistance investigating the gay population in return for his
release. Ivanenko proved to be quite good at getting secret
information, which in turn led to others providing even more
information under pressure. Burakov soon knew quite a bit about
Rostov’s underworld, from perversion to violence.

Yet Burakov still felt as if he was just
going toward more dead ends. The gay men that he investigated just
did not strike him as having the right personality disorder for these
crimes. He began to come around to Bukhanovsky’s view that this killer
was heterosexual but probably impotent when it came to normal sexual
relations. He needed more details.

Killer X

Pressure was on to solve the crimes that
had happened already, but over the next 10 months only one more body
turned up—a young woman—but she was killed near Moscow. The killer may
have moved or traveled there, but they just couldn’t tell. They
wondered if the killer had left the area or been arrested. Perhaps he
had died. Then a body was found in August of 1985. She bore
similarities to the others and she lay near an airport.

Burakov went to Moscow to look at the
photos of the dead girl. It was so similar to his recent victim in
Rostov that he knew the killer had gone to Moscow for some reason. He
checked the flight rosters between Moscow and the airport where their
victim had been found, and had officers go painstakingly through all
the handwritten tickets. But they failed to discover a significant
clue right under their noses.

Then detectives in Moscow put together a
series of murders of young boys that had begun when the Rostov
killings had stopped. All three had been raped and one was
decapitated.

But the Rostov crew was quickly drawn
back to Shakhty. In a tree grove near the bus depot, a homeless,
18-year-old girl lay dead, her mouth stuffed with leaves. This was the
same signature as the girl in Moscow earlier that month. She had a red
and a blue thread under her fingernails, and sweat near her wounds
that typed AB—different from her own type O blood. Between her fingers
was a single strand of gray hair—similar to one of the earlier
murders. This was the most evidence left at a crime scene thus far.
The detectives believed they would break this case soon.

In fact they did find a good suspect who
had also been implicated with a previous victim, and he did confess
(after 10 days of intense interrogation), but to Burakov, it did not
sound right. Nor could the suspect take them to the correct murder
site. Once again, frustratingly so, he was not their man.

Chief Investigator Issa Kostoyev (police file photo)

A special procurator with one serial killer investigation behind him,
Chief Investigator Issa Kostoyev, was appointed to look into the lesopolosa
murders. By this time, they had 15 procurators and 29 detectives
involved. Many of them were watching train and bus stations for
suspicious activity. The female officials worked undercover to try to
lure men to talk to them. Kostoyev looked over the work done thus far
and felt it had not proceeded well. In fact, he believed they’d already
come across the man they were after and just hadn’t known it. This did
nothing to improve the already-low morale of the investigating team.

To try to learn more about the type of
killer who would be so raw and brutal, Kostoyev had the classic
nineteenth-century work on sexual predators by Richard von
Krafft-Ebing translated into Russian. He also discovered a rare
edition of Crimes and Criminals in Western Culture, by B.
Utevsky, which included a chapter detailing cases of dismemberment and
disfiguring of victims. He saw that some killers were driven merely
by arrogance and the idea that their victims were objects that
belonged to them to do with as they pleased. Kostoyev stored this
information away to use when they found more suspects.

In the meantime, Yuri Kalenik was still
in prison awaiting the completion of the investigation on him, which
was now delayed by investigators looking into other areas. One of
these leads produced yet a fifth false confession. Something was
clearly wrong with the process, and Kostoyev was furious. He did not
believe that Yuri was guilty of anything.

Burakov turned again to Dr. Bukhanovsky,
finally allowing him to see all of the crime scene reports so he
could write a more detailed profile. This, he thought, might help them
to narrow the leads. Bukhanovsky took all of the materials and spent
months of his own time writing 65 pages devoted to what made sense to
him from his work with gay men, sexual dysfunction, necrophiles and
necrosadists. He labeled the unknown suspect “Killer X.”

The details, in brief, were the
following: X was not psychotic, because he was in control of what he
did and he was clearly self-interested. He was narcissistic and
arrogant, considering himself gifted, although he was not unduly
intelligent. He had a plan but he was not creative. He was
heterosexual, with boys being a “vicarious surrogate.” He was a
necrosadist, needing to watch people die in order to achieve sexual
gratification.

To render them helpless, he would hit
them in the head. Afterward, the multiple stabbing was a way to
“enter” them sexually. He either sat astride them or squatted next to
them, getting as close as possible. The deepest cuts represented the
height of his pleasure, and he might masturbate, either spontaneously
or with his hand.

There were many reasons why he might cut
out the eyes, and nothing in the crime scenes suggested what actually
motivated X. He might be excited by eyes or fear them. He might
believe his image was left on them, a superstition held by some.
Cutting into the sexual organs was a manifestation of power over
women. He might keep the missing organs or he might eat them. Removing
the sexual organs from the boys might be a way to neutralize them and
make them appear more female.

An interesting twist was the hypothesis
that X responded to changes in weather patterns. Before most of the
murders, the barometer had dropped. That might be his trigger,
especially if it coincided with other stressors at home or work. Most
of the killings were also done mid-week, from Tuesday to Thursday.

While he was vague about height and
occupation, he now thought X’s age was between 45 and 50, the age at
which sexual perversions often are most developed. It was likely that
he’d had a difficult childhood. He was conflicted and probably kept to
himself. He had a rich fantasy life, but an abnormal response to
sexuality. Bukhanovsky could not say whether or not the man was married
or had fathered children, but if he was married, his wife let him
keep his own hours and did not ask much of him.

His killing was compulsive and might
stop temporarily if he sensed he was in danger of discovery, but would
not stop altogether until he died or was caught.

Despite the length and detail of this psychological report, Burakov found nothing practical in it to help him find the man.

Police sketch of suspected killer

Then he consulted with someone who was much closer to these types of
crimes: Anatoly Slivko, a man convicted of the sexual murder of seven
boys, who faced execution. The police wanted this man to explain to
them the workings of the mind of a serial killer. Slivko attributed his
actions to his inability to engage in normal sexual arousal and
satisfaction. Sexual murderers have endless fantasies through which
they set up the rules of behavior and feel a demand for action, and the
act of planning their crimes has its own satisfaction. He offered
nothing practical for the investigation in what he said, but his manner
under questioning showed them a compartmentalized mind that could kill
boys and still feel morally indignant about using alcohol in front of
children. That meant he could live in a way that hid his true
propensities. Only hours after the interview, Slivko was executed.

The investigators believed that X was very much like Slivko, and that meant he would be next to impossible to catch.

But then, oddly, the killing seemed to stop.

Frustrations

Only one dead woman turned up in 1985 in
Rostov, and nothing happened that winter or the next spring. Then on
July 23, the body of a 33-year-old female turned up, but it bore none
of the markings of the serial killer, except that she had been
repeatedly stabbed. Burakov had doubts about her being in the series,
but not so with the young woman found on August 18. All of the
disturbing wounds were present, but she had been mostly buried, save
for a hand sticking out of the dirt—a new twist. Now they had to
wonder whether there were others not yet found who were also under the
earth.

The handwriting experts finally gave up
on the Black Cat postcard, and the police could go no farther with the
14 suspects on the list so far, all of whom Burakov believed could be
eliminated. He created a comprehensive booklet to give out to other
police departments, and a card file was created to keep track of new
leads. He and his team were dogged by the fear that this case might
never be solved.

At the end of 1986 Viktor Burakov finally
had a nervous breakdown. He was weak and exhausted, and could not
sleep, so he went to a hospital, where he remained for a month. Then
he was sent to rest for another month. Four years of intense work had
come to this. But he would not give up.

He had no idea then that he was only halfway there. This devil was not yet finished.

Burakov’s period of rest, however, had
given him some perspective. He’d been able to think over their
strategies thus far and felt that none was taking them down the
correct route. Not only that, all were time- and resource-consuming.
He might only catch this killer if he surfaced again—in other words,
murdered someone. It was a grim thought, but it could be their only
hope

Yet nothing occurred for the rest of that year or throughout all of 1987.

The winter melted into spring before a
railroad worker found a woman’s nude body in a weedy area near the
tracks on April 6, 1988. Her hands were bound behind her, she had been
stabbed multiple times, the tip of her nose was gone, and her skull
had been bashed in. Only a large footprint was found nearby. People
recalled seeing her but she had been alone. There was no sign of
sexual assault and her eyes had not been touched. Nor had she been
killed in the woods.

The investigators pondered whether they should include this murder in the series. Perhaps the lesopolosa
killer was no longer in business. Yet only a month later, on May 17,
the body of a 9-year-old boy was discovered in the woods not far from a
train station. He’d been sodomized and then his orifices were stuffed
with dirt. He also bore numerous knife wounds and a blow to the skull,
and his penis had been removed.

Unlike the murdered female, the boy was
quickly identified as Aleksei Voronko, missing for two days. A
classmate had seen him with a middle-aged man with gold teeth, a
mustache and a sports bag. They had gone together to the woods and
Aleksei had said he would soon return but did not.

This was a strong lead, one that could
be followed up among area dentists. Few adults in the region could
afford gold crowns for their teeth.

Yet by the end of that year, they had
turned up nothing. Not only that, they learned from the Ministry of
Health that it had been a mistake to assume that typing blood in
secretions was an accurate match to blood types (or, alternatively, to
assume that the labs were providing accurate results). There were
rare “paradoxical” cases in which they did not match. In other words,
any of the suspects eliminated based on blood type could have been
their killer. While this was frustrating news and made the
investigation more difficult in many ways, it also opened a few doors
from the past. However, it meant taking semen samples (which had to be
voluntary), not blood types, and it also meant redoing four years
worth of work to that point. The idea was overwhelming.

The only method of investigation that seemed viable now was to post more men to watch the public transportation stations.

Still, the killer did not strike. It was April 1989 before they came across another victim who could be added to the lesopolosa series.

The Count Rises

This discovery, in the woods near a
train station, was that of a 16-year-old boy reported missing since
the summer before. His killer had stabbed him repeatedly and had
removed his testicles and penis. He was badly decomposed and had lain
under the snow for months. A watch, inscribed from his aunt and uncle,
was missing. It would help immensely if it was found in someone’s
possession.

None of the investigators assigned to
ride the trains and watch people in the stations in that area had
reported anything suspicious. No older men with boys or women. However,
a ticket clerk reported that she had seen a man that summer on the
platform. He had tried to convince her son to go into the words with
him. The police did locate him, but quickly eliminated him as the
killer they were seeking.

However, Yuri Kalenik had been released
from prison after serving five years and he now lived near the area
where the body was found. Perhaps they had been hasty in releasing him.
When questioned, he insisted he knew nothing, so they let him go.

Then on May 11, an 8-year-old boy
disappeared. He was found two months later by the side of a road,
stabbed and genitally mutilated. This change in the killer’s habits,
from the woods to out in the open, alerted the officials to the
possibility that he might have noticed all the surveillance at the
train stations and changed his manner of procuring victims.

Elena Varga, victim

That was disturbing. Yet killing someone so near a road was also
careless. That could be a hopeful sign. Even the most organized killer
can disintegrate as need replaces caution.

Then he killed a Hungarian student,
Elena Varga, in August, in a wooded area that was far from any train
or bus station. Her body had been violated like all the other female
victims in the lesopolosa series.

Aleksei Khobotov, victim

In just over a week, the fourth victim, a 10-year-old boy, Aleksei
Khobotov, went missing, and four months later, early in 1990, the
sexually mutilated body of an 11-year-old boy turned up in a lesopolosa.
Then another 10-year-old boy was killed, his sexual organs cut off,
and his tongue missing. It appeared to have been bitten off.

Victor Petrov, victim

Once more, the killer shifted his pattern and went for a female victim,
and at the end of July in 1990, workmen found a 13-year-old boy,
Victor Petrov, killed and mutilated in the Botanical Gardens.

They now had what they believed were 32
victims over the past eight years and the newspapers, now free to
report this news after the loosening of government control, were
putting pressure on the investigators. Those in the top positions
threatened those on lower rungs with being fired. This killer had to
be stopped. People were getting desperate.

Then on August 17 Ivan Fomin, 11, went
swimming not far from his grandmother’s cottage. In the tall reeds not
far from numerous potential witnesses who should have heard if not
seen him, the serial killer had stabbed him 42 times and castrated
him. This was outrageous and the public was getting angry.

Burakov decided on a new plan. He would
select the most likely stations and then make surveillance obvious in
the others, so that only those with plainclothes officers would seem
safe to the killer. In other words, they would try to force him into
action in a particular place, and in those places, they would record
the names of every man who came and went. They would also place people
in the forests nearby, dressed as farmers. It was a major task, with
over 350 people who had to be in place and do their jobs for
who-knows-how-long, but it seemed viable.

It seemed that the train station in
Donleskhoz station might be a good place to set up a post, for
example, since two of the victims had been found near there. Mushroom
pickers generally used it during the summer, but not many other
people. Two other stations were selected as well.

But even before the plan was enacted,
the killer chose a victim from the Donleskhoz station. He killed a
16-year-old retarded boy, stabbing him 27 times and mutilating him
before discarding his clothes. Part of his tongue was missing, as were
his testicles, and one eye had been stabbed. When his identity was
established, officers learned that he spent most of his time on the electrichka, the slow-moving train, but no one had seen him exit with anyone.

Burokov was in despair. They had a good plan and had it been in place, they might have caught the guy.

Victor Tishcenko, victim

Then another 16-year-old boy, Victor Tishchenko, was reported missing
who had gone to the Shakhty railroad station to pick up tickets. Cullen
writes that the handsome, athletic Tishcenko was larger than any
other male victim thus far, weighing around 130 pounds. They found his
body two miles south, in the woods and in the usual condition. It was
where the mother and daughter had been found six years earlier. In
the grove, there was evidence of a prolonged struggle.

Burakov got moving. The snare was set,
with everyone in place, but the killer killed again, undetected. This
time, his victim was a young woman. She was number 36, and she had
been beaten and sliced open, and part of her tongue cut off. But no
one had seen a thing.

Yet there were reports of men who had
been at the train station nearby. One name stood out. In fact, they
were chilled by it. They had seen this one before. To that point,
according to Moira Martingale in Cannibal Killers, over half a
million people had been investigated, but this one had been
interrogated before and only released because his blood type had not
matched the semen samples.

And they knew the lab work had been faulty. This was the killer. They were sure of it.

Endgame

Andrei Chikatilo mugshot

Andrei Romanovich Chikatilo, 54, had been at the Donleskhoz train
station on November 6. He had been questioned and cleared in 1984. He
had now been placed at the scene of a victim’s disappearance. He was
seen coming out of the woods and had washed his hands at a pump. He
also had a red smear on his cheek and ear, a cut finger, and twigs on
the back of his coat. The officer at the station had taken down his
name.

Burakov had the man placed under
surveillance. They soon learned that he had resigned from his post as a
teacher due to reports that he had molested students. He had then
worked for another enterprise, but was fired when he failed to return
from business trips with the supplies he was sent to get. So what had
he been doing with his time? During the time he had spent in jail in
1984, there had been no murders, and his travel records coincided with
other murders—including the one in Moscow. He once had been a member
in good standing with the Communist Party, but had been expelled due
to his incarceration.

But all the evidence was circumstantial.
Investigators would need to catch him in the act or get him to
confess. Keeping him under surveillance, they saw an ordinary man
doing nothing unusual. It was frustrating. Kostoyev, who had finally
read the earlier report on this man, ordered his arrest.

On November 20, 1990, three officers
dressed in street clothes brought Chikatilo in for interrogation, and
they noticed that he did not have a mouth full of gold teeth as one
witness had indicated. They learned that he was married and had two
children, and that he was something of an intellectual with a
university degree. In his satchel they found a folding pocketknife.

Knives found in Chikatilo’s possession, trial evidence

They placed Chikatilo in a cell with a gifted informant, who was
expected to get him to admit to what he had done, but failed. A search
of Chikatilo’s home, which shamed his family, produced no evidence from
victims, but did yield 23 knives. Two writers have claimed these
weapons were used for the murders, but that was not proven.

The next day, Kostoyev decided to handle
the interrogation, and he did so in the presence of Chikatilo’s
court-appointed lawyer. Richard Lourie based much of his book, Hunting the Devil,
on the time that Kostoyev spent with Chikatilo. Contrary to other
versions of this narrative that show him to be an angry and impatient
interrogator, Lourie says that Kostoyev had decided to use compassion
to get the suspect to talk.

He wanted the room to be spare, with
only a safe inside that would hint to the prisoner of evidence against
him. There was also a desk, a table, and two chairs. When Chikatilo
was brought in, Kostoyev could see that he was a tall, older man with a
long neck, sloping shoulders, oversized glasses, and gray hair. He
used a shuffling gait, like a weary elderly person, but Kostoyev was
not fooled. He believed Chikatilo was a calculating killer with plenty
of energy when he needed it. Chikatilo looked easy to break, and
Kostoyev had only failed to obtain a confession in three out of
hundreds of interrogations. He would get inside the suspect’s head,
figure out his logic, and get him to talk. All guilty men eventually
confessed. They had to. Besides, he had 10 days in which to succeed,
and he had bait.

Chikatilo began with a statement that
the police had made a mistake, just as they had in 1984 when he’d
first been investigated. He denied that he had been at a train station
on November 6 and did not know why it had been reported. Kostoyev
knew he was lying, and he let Chikatilo know that. The next day,
Chikatilo waived his right to legal counsel.

Then Chikatilo wrote a three-page
document to which he confessed to “sexual weakness”—the words he had
used before—and to years of humiliation. He hinted at “perverse sexual
activity” but did not name it, and said that he was out of control.
He admitted to nothing specific. But he wrote another, longer essay in
which he said that he did move around in the train stations and saw
how young people there were the victims of homeless beggars. He also
admitted that he was impotent. It appeared to be an indirect
confession, feeling guilt but fending it off by fingering other
suspects and also hinting at how it was best that some of these
beggars had died rather than reproduce. Nevertheless, he mentioned
that he had thought of suicide.

Andrei Chikatilo (police file photo)

Kostoyev told him that his only hope would be to confess everything in a
way that would show he had mental problems, so that an examination
could affirm that he was legally insane and he could be treated.
Otherwise the evidence they had would surely convict him without a
confession and he would have no hope to save himself. That was
Kostoyev’s bait, and he felt sure it would be effective.

Chikatilo asked for a few days to
collect himself and said he would then submit to an interrogation.
Everyone expected that he would confess, but when the day arrived, he
insisted he was guilty of no crimes. For each crucial time period
involving a murder, he claimed that he had been at home with his wife.
Clearly he had used the extra two days alone in his cell to become
more resolved.

The next day, he revised his statements
somewhat. In fact, he had been involved in some criminal activity—but
not the murders. In 1977, he had fondled some female students who had
aroused him. He had difficulty controlling himself around children,
but there were only two instances in which he had lost control.

He wrote again, but again revealed
nothing, and nine days elapsed with Kostoyev getting no closer to his
goal. He did not know what approach to take to pressure this man to
finally open up.

A medical examination indicated that
Chikatilo’s blood type was A, but his semen supposedly had a weak B
antibody, making it appear that his blood type was AB, though it
wasn’t. He was the “paradoxical” rare case—if such an analysis could
be believed.

The informant in Chikatilo’s cell,
writes Cullen, eventually told Burakov that the interrogation
techniques were not according to protocol and that they were rough and
made Chikatilo defensive. It was unlikely they were going to work.
Kostoyev brought in photographers to humiliate Chikatilo and pressure
him to believe that they had witnesses to whom they were going to show
these photographs. Still, he did not give any ground.

Nine days had elapsed. They were allowed
only 10 before having to charge him with a specific crime, and thus
far, they did not have enough proof of even one. It was looking very
much like they might have to let him go. And that could be disastrous.
Burakov, says Cullen, thought they should try another interrogator,
and his candidate was Dr. Bukhanovsky. Cullen also says that Kostoyev
initially resisted this idea, but finally had to admit he was getting
nowhere. He agreed to let the psychiatrist see what he could do.
Lourie, presenting things from Kostoyev’s side, says that using the
psychiatrist was one of Kostoyev’s clever ploys. Lourie does not
mention Burakov’s role in the decision.

Whoever thought of it, this was clearly a wise move.

The Psychiatrist and the Murderer

Bukhanovsky agreed to question
Chikatilo, but out of professional interest, not for the court.
Burakov agreed to these conditions. Bukhanovsky was soon in a closed
room alone with the best suspect in the lesopolosa murders.

Andrei Chikatilo mugshot

The psychiatrist saw right away, writes Cullen, that this was the type
of man that he had described in his 1987 profile. So many of the
indicators were there—ordinary, solitary, non-threatening. He
introduced himself with a show of humility and then showed Chikatilo
the profile. He sensed that this man wanted to talk about his rage and
his humiliation, so it was best to show sympathy and listen. He spent
two hours doing that, and then began to discuss the crimes.

In the film, Citizen X,
Bukhanovsky is shown asking Chikatilo to help him on some aspects of
the profile that he was not quite certain about. He reads the relevant
pages to him, and one sees Chikatilo listening intently, as if alert
to the only person who seems ever to have understood him.
Bukhanovsky’s description goes into the nature of Chikatilo’s mental
illness and some reasons for it. As Chikatilo hears his secret life
described so clearly, he begins to tremble. Finally he affirms what
the psychiatrist is saying, breaks down and admits that it’s all true.
He has done those horrible things.

Bukhanovsky talked with him for hours and then went out and told police interrogators that the suspect was now ready to confess.

Kostoyev prepared a formal statement accusing Chikatilo of 36 murders. He was off by a long shot, but no one yet knew that.

Yelena Zakotnova, victim

Chikatilo read the statement of charges and admitted that he was guilty
of the crimes listed. He wanted now to tell the truth about his life
and what had led him into these crimes. Among his admissions was his
first murder, which had occurred not when the police had first begun to
keep track with Lyubov Biryuk but years early in 1978. He had killed a
little girl, Yelena Zakotnova, age 9.

The Secret House crime scene

This was alarming, since a man had already been arrested, tried and
executed for that murder. But Chikatilo said that he had moved to
Shakhty that year to teach. Before his family arrived, his free time
was spent watching children and feeling a strong desire to see them
without their clothes on. To maintain his privacy, he purchased a hut
on a dark, dirty street. When he went to it one day, he came upon the
girl, was seized with urgent sexual desire, and took her to the hut to
attack her.

When he could not achieve an erection, he
had moved in imitation of the sexual act and used his knife as a
substitute. During his frenzy of strangulation and stabbing, he
blindfolded her. Once she was dead, he tossed her body into a nearby
river. Lourie devotes a chapter to the fact that he was a suspect,
seen by a witness, and that blood was found on his doorstep, but the
other man had confessed under torture, so Chikatilo was free.
Chikatilo was shocked to nearly have been caught.

Kostoyev asked him to explain the
blindfold, and just as they had suspected, Chikatilo admitted that he
had heard that the image of a killer remains in the eyes of a victim.
It was a superstition, but he had believed it. That was why he had
wounded so many others in the eyes. Then he had decided it was not
true, so he stopped doing that (explaining the change in pattern).
Later he admitted that he just had not liked his victims looking at him
as he attacked them.

Lourie describes how Chikatilo hated to
see how vagrants at train stations went off into the woods for sexual
encounters that he could never emulate. His fantasies became more
violent. In 1981, he repeated his manner of attack on a vagrant girl
looking for money, but he also used his teeth on her to bite off a
nipple and swallow it. “At the moment of cutting her and seeing the
body cut open,” he said, “I involuntarily ejaculated.” He covered her
with newspaper and took her sexual organs away with him, only to cast
them aside in the woods.

Chikatilo re-enacts crime, evidence

He remembered the details of each of the 36 lesopolosa murders
and went through them, one by one. Sometimes he acted as a predator,
learning someone’s routes and habits and finding a way to get that
person alone. Others were victims of opportunity who happened along at
the wrong time. The stabbing almost always was a substitute for sexual
intercourse that could not be performed. He had learned how to squat
beside them in such a way as to avoid getting their blood on his
clothing (which he demonstrated with a mannequin). At any rate, he
worked in a shipping firm, so there was always an excuse for a scrape
or cut. It seemed that his impotence generally triggered the rage,
especially if the women made demands or ridiculed him. He soon
understood that he could not get aroused without violence. “I had to
see blood and wound the victims.”

With the boys, it was different,
although they bled just as easily as women and that’s what he needed
most. Chikatilo would fantasize that these boys were his captives and
that he was a hero for torturing and doing them in. He could not give a
reason for cutting off their tongues and penises, although at one
point he said he was taking revenge against life on the genitals of
his victims. Lourie says, based on the psychiatric reports, that
Chikatilo would place his semen inside a uterus that he had just
removed and as he walked along, he would chew on it—”the truffle of
sexual murder.” He never admitted to actually consuming these organs,
but searches never turned up any discarded remains.

“But the whole thing,” Chikatilo said,
“—the cries, the blood, the agony—gave me relaxation and a certain
pleasure.” He liked the taste of their blood and would even tear at
their mouths with his teeth. He said it gave him an “animal
satisfaction” to chew or swallow nipples or testicles.

To corroborate what he was saying, he
drew sketches of the crime scenes, and what he said fit the known
facts. Then he confirmed what everyone had feared—he added more
victims to the list. Many more.

One boy he had killed in a cemetery and
placed in a shallow grave—a hole, he said, that he had dug for himself
when he had contemplated suicide. He took the interrogators there and
they recovered the body. Another was killed in a field, and she was
located. On and on it went, murders here and there, and the bodies
were always left right where they were killed, except for one.
Chikatilo described a murder in an empty apartment and to get the body
out, he had to dismember it and dump the parts down a sewer. The
police had wondered whether this one was part of the series and had
decided that there were too many dissimilarities to include it.

Andrei Chikatilo mugshot, profile

In the end, he confessed to 56 murders (Lourie counts it as 55),
although there was corroboration for only 53: 31 females and 22 males.
Burakov, says Cullen, believed that there might actually be more.

They now had sufficient evidence to take this man to court. In the meantime, they discovered more about him.

The Roots of Perversity

He was born in 1936 into a small
Ukrainian village and his head was misshapen from water on the brain.
He had a sister seven years younger. His father was a POW in WWII and
then was sent to a prison camp in Russia, so his mother raised him
mostly on her own.

In the HBO documentary, “Cannibal” and in Moira Martingale’s book Cannibal Killers,
some of Chikatilo’s background is described in a chilling context as a
way to try to understand what drove him into such a bestial frenzy.
In fact, Martingale sees a direct connection between those times and
Chikatilo’s sexual fantasies. He was like a werewolf, changing into a
ravaging animal when triggered in just the right way. Much of this
information came from the confession, the assessments done later, and
from investigative research.

During the early part of the twentieth
century, the former Soviet Union was often subjected to famines,
especially in the Ukraine after Stalin crushed out private agriculture
and sent many citizens to the Siberian Gulag. Some six million people
died of starvation, according to Cullen, and desperate people might
remove meat from corpses to survive. Sometimes they went to a
cemetery, where corpses were stacked, and sometimes (legend has it)
they grabbed someone on the street. Human flesh was bought and sold,
or just hoarded.

Children saw disfigured corpses and heard
terrible tales of hardship. Chikatilo had grown up during several of
these famines and one story that his mother told was how he once had
had an older brother, Stepan, who had been killed. In a prison
interview, he said, “Many people went crazy, attacked people, ate
people. So they caught my brother, who was 10, and ate him.” He might
simply have died and been consumed, if he even existed (which could not
be corroborated in any records), but Chikatilo’s mother would warn
him to stay in the yard or he might get eaten as well. It was a scary
idea, but titillating.

He also saw the results of Nazi
occupation and of German bombing, with bodies blown up in the streets.
He said that they frightened and excited him.

Most of his childhood was spent alone,
living in his fantasies. Other children mocked him for his awkwardness
and sensitivity. He began to develop anger at this age, even rage. To
entertain and empower himself, he devised images of torture, and
these remained a fixed part of his killings later in life.

He had his first sexual experience as an
adolescent when he struggled with a 10-year-old friend of his
sister’s and ejaculated. That impressed itself on him, especially as
he went along in life unable to get an erection but able to ejaculate.
The struggle became as fixed in his mind as the images of torture.

He went into the army but when he came
home and tried to have a girlfriend, he found he was still unable to
perform the sexual act. The girl spread this around, humiliating him,
and he dreamed about catching her and tearing her to pieces. His life,
as far as he could see, was now a disaster.

He became a schoolteacher and did get
married (which was arranged by his sister), but could only conceive
children, according to the HBO documentary, by ejaculating outside his
wife and pushing his semen inside by hand. Much like his mother, his
wife was critical, which only made Chikatilo withdraw even further
into his fantasy world. His mother died in 1973 when he was 37, and it
wasn’t long before he found himself attracted to young girls and
began to molest them. It made him feel powerful, and when incidents
were reported, they were met with cover-up and denial instead of
prosecution, allowing a pervert to become a killer.

For true satisfaction, he needed to get
violent, and by 1978, he killed his first victim. Since he was on the
road quite often as a parts supply liaison, it became easy to find
vulnerable strangers, dominate them and murder them. He didn’t have to
go looking for them, he said. They were always right there and they
were usually willing to follow him. He had read the newspaper reports
about the murders when the press was allowed to print them and had
known it was only a matter of time before it would all end. Being
arrested, he admitted, was a relief.

Chikatilo believed he suffered from an
illness that provoked his uncontrollable transgressions. He wanted to
see some specialists in sexual deviance, and said that he would answer
all questions. (Lourie says this was part of Kostoyev’s plan.)

He was sent to Moscow’s Serbsky Institute
for two months for psychiatric and neurological assessment, and it
was determined that he had brain damage from birth. It had affected
his ability to control his bladder and his seminal emissions. His
mother criticized him for it repeatedly, and was often cruel. He had
deviant fantasies. However, after all the reports, he was found to be
sane. He knew what he was doing and he could have controlled it. That
was good enough for the prosecutor.

The Beast in the Cage

They brought him into the Rostov
courtroom on April 14, 1992, and put him into a large iron cage
painted off-white, where he could either stand or sit. The judge sat
on a dais and two citizens on either side acted as jurors. There were
225 volumes of information collected about him and against him.

Chikatilo in court, caged, police file

The press wrote about “the Maniac” and spread the word about his
upcoming trial, so the courtroom, which seated 250, was filled with the
family of many of his alleged victims. When he entered, they began to
scream at him. Bald and without his glasses, he looked slightly
crazy, especially when he drooled and rolled his eyes later in the
trial.

Throughout, Chikatilo appeared to be
bored, except when he’d show a flash of anger and yell back at the
crowd. On two separate occasions, he opened his trousers and pulled
them down to expose his penis, insisting he was not a homosexual. They
removed him from the courtroom.

That he would be found guilty of murder
was a foregone conclusion, but there was a chance that his
psychological problems could save him from execution. However, his
lawyer, Marat Khabibulin, did not have the right to call psychiatric
experts, only to cross-examine those that the prosecution brought in,
and since he had not been appointed until after Chikatilo had fully
confessed, he was at a real disadvantage.

Although the prosecutors were Anatoly
Zadorozhny and N. F. Gerasimenko, Judge Leonid Akubzhanov became
Chikatilo’s chief enemy, asking sharp questions of the witnesses and
throwing demeaning comments at the prisoner, who often did not
respond. After several months, however, Chikatilo challenged the
judge, claiming that he was the one in charge. “This is my funeral,”
the defendant said.

At one time, he spontaneously denied
doing six of the murders and at another, he added four new ones. He
claimed to be a victim of the former Soviet system and called himself a
“mad beast.” According to Krivich and Ol’gin, he also claimed that
there should be 70 “incidents” attributed to him, not 53. At one
point, they write, when he was asked whether he had kept track as he
killed his victims, Chikatilo said, “I considered them to be enemy
aircraft I had shot down.”

No one adequately addressed the fact
that there was a discrepancy between the blood type in the semen
samples and Chikatilo’s blood type. The forensic analyst explained her
discovery of the rare phenomenon of a man having one blood type but
secreting another, but this hypothesis was later ridiculed around the
world. Yet with no forensic experts hired for the defense, there was
little the defense attorney could do. The judge, with his clear bias
against the defendant, accepted the unusual analysis.

The court accepted the psychiatric
diagnosis of sanity. One psychiatrist examined him yet again and said
that he was still of the same opinion. It was Chikatilo’s predatory
behavior and ability to shift to safer locales that showed his degree
of control, as well as the fact that he had stopped for over a year at
one point (a year in which he said he had celebrated his 50th
birthday and was in a good mood).

The trial went into August. The defense
summed up its side by saying that the evidence and psychiatric
analyses were flawed and the confessions had been coerced. He asked
for a verdict of not guilty.

The next day, Chikatilo broke into song
from his cage and then talked a string of nonsense, with accusations
that he was being “radiated.” He was taken out before the prosecutor
began his final argument. He reiterated what sadism meant, repeated
each of the crimes, and asked for the death penalty.

Chikatilo was brought in and given a final opportunity to speak for himself. He remained mute.

The judge took two months to reach a
verdict, and on October 14, six months after the trial begun, he
pronounced Andrei Chikatilo guilty of five counts of molestation and
52 counts of murder. Then Chikatilo cried out incoherently, shouting
“Swindlers,” spitting, throwing his bench, and demanding to see the
corpses. The judge sentenced him to be executed. The people shouted
for Chikatilo to be turned over to them to be torn to pieces as he had
done to their loved ones. But instead he was taken back to his cell
to await the results of an appeal. His lawyer claimed through official
channels that the psychiatric assessment had not been objective and
he wanted further analysis.

A rumor circulated that the Japanese
wanted to pay $1 million for the Maniac’s brain, Lourie writes, but
there was no substance to it. Yet many professionals did believe that
his behavior was so aberrant that he should be studied alive.

This man with a university degree in
Russian literature, a wife and children, and no apparent background of
child abuse, clearly had a savage heart. As he said of himself, he
was apparently “a mistake of nature.” It’s unfortunate that a better
biopsychological analysis was never performed.

On February 15, 1994, when his appeal was
turned down, he was taken to a special soundproof room and shot
behind the right ear, ending his life.

Legacies

Chikatilo has become one of the world’s
most renowned serial killers, cited in books and articles such as Dr.
Louis Schlesinger’s Serial Offenders, as a man with truly
perverse tastes and killing habits. Thanks to him, Russian specialists
can now engage in better study of serial killers and consult with
professionals like the FBI in other countries. The same can be said
for Bukhanovsky.

Newsweek published a story in
1999 about the area around Rostov-on-Don to the effect that it was now
a hotbed of serial crimes. “Twenty-nine multiple murderers and
rapists have been caught in the area over the past ten years,” writes
Owen Matthews. He claims that such a statistic makes Rostov the serial
killer capital of the world. Not only that, but Dr. Bukhanovsky has
become such an expert via his private clinic for sexual disorders that
he claims he can now cure violent psychopaths. To prove it, he worked
with an active killer still at large—a controversial decision. He
feels that he cannot break a confidence and that his study will help
science determine the roots of aggression. A child rapist who was
caught said that Bukhanovsky had a way of getting people to tell him
things they would ordinarily keep secret. That appears to have been
his talent with Chikatilo.